WibiData is designed for management of, investigative analytics on, and operational analytics on consumer internet data, the main examples of which are web site traffic and personalization and their analogues for games and/or mobile devices. The core WibiData technology, built on HBase and Hadoop, is a data management and analytic execution layer. That’s where the secret sauce resides.

GigaOm’s Derrick Harris posits that Odiago points to “the future of Hadoop-based products.” Rather than having to “roll your own” Hadoop solutions, future Hadoop users will be able to build their apps to tap into other products that do the “heavy lifting.”

Hortonworks launches its data platform

Hadoop company Hortonworks, which spun out of Yahoo earlier this year, officially announced its products and services this week. The Hortonworks Data Platform is an open source distribution powered by Apache Hadoop. It includes the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), MapReduce, Pig, Hive, HBase and Zookeeper, as well as HCatalog and open APIs for integration. THe Hortonworks Data Platform also includes Ambari, another Apache project, that will serve as the Hadoop installation and management system.

It’s possible Hortonworks’ efforts will pick up the pace of the Hadoop release cycle and address what ReadWriteWeb’s Scott Fulton sees as the “degree of fragmentation and confusion.” But as GigaOm’s Derrick Harris points out, there is still “so much Hadoop in so many places, with multiple companies offering their own Hadoop solutions.

Strata 2012 — The 2012 Strata Conference, being held Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.

Big education content meets big education data

A couple of weeks ago, the adaptive learning startup Knewton announced that it had raised an additional $33 million. This latest round was led by Pearson, the largest education company in the world. As such, the announcement this week that Knewton and Pearson are partnering is hardly surprising.

But this partnership does mark an important development for big data, textbook publishing, and higher education.

Knewton’s adaptive learning platform will be integrated with Pearson’s digital courseware, giving students individualized content as they move through the materials. To begin with, Knewton will work with just a few of the subjects within Pearson’s MyLab and Mastering catalog. There are more than 750 courses in that catalog, and the adaptive learning platform will be integrated with more of them soon. The companies also say they plan to “jointly develop a line of custom, next-generation digital course solutions, and will explore new products in the K12 and international markets.”

The data from Pearson’s vast student customer base — some 9 million higher ed students use Pearson materials — will certainly help Knewton refine its learning algorithms. In turn, the promise of adaptive learning systems means that students and teachers will be able to glean insights from the learning process — what students understand, what they don’t — in real time. It also means that teachers can provide remediation aimed at students’ unique strengths and weaknesses.